spring sunset

Partly blue sky with dark clouds awash in orange-pink.

more of a comment
than a question

We have barred owls who often call at sunset (and at other random times throughout the day and night) so I started out thinking about that who and went from there. The result being itself a bit of a head-scratcher is, to my way of thinking, permissibly self-reflexive.

As it happens, while I was composing this, sitting on a bench near what we call the Far Field and thinking about barred owls, one of them let out a loud who from a hundred yards away. If I thought more readers would be familiar with the birders’ mnemonic for its full call, I might have gone with my penultimate draft:

spring sunset
who cooks
for you all

pruning season

View across a two-lane road of rows of recently pruned, bare fruit trees under a powerline with steel pylons.

the angel of history’s
prosthetic wings

When there’s too much to fit into a haiku — the giant pylons, each tree’s signature of knots, the scream of a red-tailed hawk circling low overhead — my instinct is to reach for some unifying symbol. The Biden administration’s apparent decision to double down on our forever wars has been preying on my mind.

Made in Snapseed with a font that’s only supposed to be used for single lines of text, but since it looks so handwritten, it’s not imperative to get each line exactly the same height, so saving one line at a time more or less works.

moon on ice

full moon reflected in a window pane

that emphatic
WHO-all

Mountains so long and low

Close-up of the grain in an old log with trees and sky behind it.

we forget after a while that they aren’t the horizon, that their trees don’t go on forever, that the sky is wider than we can know.

Four months away

Full moon rising over wooded ridges.

even the full moon isn’t
where I left it

Purely cosmetic.

You don’t actually have to be able to see at all!

It was only when I switched to unlined paper

Powerline against a sky crossed by multiple contrails.

that the poems began to come without being called.

Resolution

A crowd of young, helf-broken-looking black locust trees lit up against the sky.

I must never forget how exhilarating it felt to find myself briefly at the head of a mob.

Blue blood

A small stream flowing through the snowy edge of a meadow, reflecting the blue sky.

belongs only to those with no need for veins, like a wanderlust that starts where the highway ends.

Neurons take a dendritic form

The bare crowns of oaks silhouetted against the sky.

to maximize their receptivity to the lightning of thought.